


Broken and Clear

by ant5b



Category: DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: AU where Scrooge adopts Lena, Father-Daughter Relationship, Lena deserves better, Set during and post the canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-29
Updated: 2018-08-29
Packaged: 2019-07-03 23:55:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15829527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ant5b/pseuds/ant5b
Summary: So, between the adventures and budget meetings and family dinners, Scrooge found himself worrying about the quiet teenager who always took the seat furthest away from him.





	Broken and Clear

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://mighty-ant.tumblr.com/)  
> Check out my DuckTales podcast [here](http://amorespatospodcast.libsyn.com/)

Before the shadow war, before Magica’s return, before he watched a child be dragged, screaming, into the witch’s literal shadow, Scrooge would look at Lena and wonder.

 

He remembered the first morning she visited the mansion. She, Webby, and the boys were just meant to have gone to the movie theater, but ended up stamping through the front door around dawn. They came in bruised and battered, but positively buzzing with an energy that Scrooge found contagious, despite the early wake-up call.

Even Beakley wasn’t immune, cheerfully informing him she would be making pancakes for breakfast.

As they sat down at the table, the boys eagerly delved into the tale of their perilous underground escapades and the subterranean creatures they discovered. They urged Webby to show Scrooge her illustrations, which she did with some mix of embarrassment and pride.

This was still at the beginning of Scrooge’s awkward attempts at reaching out to the girl, and with her eyes on him he felt the stab of a decade’s worth of guilt, like a knife twisting low in his chest. He wasn’t able to offer more than a, “Very impressive, Webbigail!” but Webby still smiled at him like he’d hung the stars (and didn’t that just bury the knife a little deeper).

She ran back to the seat furthest from Scrooge, where her pink-haired friend sat.

Lena’s expression was of the naturally surly kind, her eyes half-lidded and looking largely bored unless Webby was engaging her in conversation. A teenager, though only just.

Scrooge had no say in what kind of friends Webby made, not when she only called him “Mr. McDuck” and he’d yet to make an effort to change that. But Lena’s presence set off alarm bells in his head, for reasons he couldn’t identify.

He made eye contact with Beakley as she returned bearing a tray laden with pancakes. With a quick glance in Lena’s direction, she understood his concerns. But Beakley shook her head and smiled slightly, putting the worst of Scrooge’s suspicions at ease.

But his strange feeling regarding the girl never quite went away.

 

Scrooge would look at Lena sometimes, when he was sure she wouldn’t notice.

For all the mischief she got up to with Webby, she was surprisingly quiet around anyone else. While he might have attributed this to general teenager-ness under other circumstances, that easy assessment didn’t sit right with him.

Lena was always looking over her shoulder, for one. And not in the same way the boys did, when they were bending one of Beakley’s house rules. Lena looked over her shoulder like she expected something (or someone) to materialize there and snatch her away.

She looked tired more often than not. But tired in a way that went beyond successive late-night sleepovers, in a way that reminded Scrooge a little of countless nights spent in a dark control tower, clutching a radio that would only spit static.

Once, she, Webby, and the boys got it into their heads to build a blanket fort in the downstairs living room.

Scrooge wandered by when they started taking the chairs from his dining table. He strode in, demanding they put everything back the way they found it. He’d had the entire set made from the hull of the Flying Dutchman, after all, there was no sense in risking the kids damaging it.

There’d been a tray of silverware sitting on the table that Beakley had set aside to polish, and Huey, so startled by his entrance, knocked it to the ground with a sharp, echoing clatter.

And Lena let out an aborted scream as she dropped the chair she’d still been carrying, covering her beak with wide, panicked eyes. The chair unbalanced and tipped over.

“Did you hurt yourself, Lena?” Webby immediately asked, hurrying close and clutching Lena’s arm.

The boys rushed over as well, looking concerned and in Huey’s case, guilty.

Lena adopted a pained smile, and began favoring her left foot. “Yeah,” she said snarkily, “Red over here got me thinking we were under attack, and I dropped the stupid chair on my foot.”

“I’m so sorry,” Huey insisted, “let me get you some ice!”

As he dashed off, and Webby righted the chair that had fallen over and ushered Lena into it.

“I could carry you to the fort?” Webby suggested, perhaps a little too eagerly. “So you don’t hurt your foot more.”

Lena’s smile softened, making the bags under her eyes less prominent. “Well if you’re offering,” she said.

As Louie complained about wanting to be carried too, Scrooge quietly stepped out of the dining room before they could remember he was there.

The ordeal left him feeling shaken and faintly ill, but he was furious more than anything else.

Lena didn’t talk about her home life. This much he knew from overhearing conversations between Webby and Beakley. Whereas others would do anything to see the home of the richest duck in the world, neither a parent or guardian of hers ever came up to the mansion, despite Lena staying with them sometimes for days at a time.

Launchpad told him that on the occasions he drove Lena back from a sleepover, she never gave him an address. Instead she had him drop her off outside fast food joints, the mall, and once an abandoned amphitheater.

Scrooge didn’t know how to broach the subject with Lena. He hardly knew the girl, for all that her behavior and circumstances worried him.

Once, for lack of anything better to say, he’d asked, “What do you parents do for a living?”

Lena looked at him like he’d spoken to her in pig Latin. “I live with my aunt,” she’d replied, short and to the point, and said nothing else on the matter.

So, between the adventures and budget meetings and family dinners, Scrooge found himself worrying about the quiet teenager who always took the seat furthest from him.

 

Lena would look at Scrooge sometimes, when she thought he wouldn’t notice.

She’d been spending the night at the mansion more often than not now, and her presence was gradually becoming as familiar as the boys’ or Webby’s.

In the years before Huey, Dewey, and Louie came into his life, he hadn’t bothered to care about what people thought of him. But now he was all too aware of Webby’s admiring gaze, and the television pundits debating what his return to adventuring could mean for the city of Duckburg.

When Lena first started coming around the mansion, she afforded Scrooge the same caution and suspicion one gave a venomous snake. She’d watch him out of the corner of her eye whenever he was in the room, tensed whenever he spoke.

Scrooge didn’t think she was even aware of the behavior. It had originally led him to believe that she was stealing from him, but he’d never managed to find a single thing out of place. It was almost like Lena went out of her way _not_ to touch anything, sitting on the edge of her seat or standing in the middle of the room (or more often, by the exits).

In time, her glances lost most of their heat, and she would look at him with something akin to confusion, like she didn’t know quite what to make of him.

The feeling was mutual.

 

One night, late enough to be considered early, Scrooge found himself lying awake in bed for no particular reason.

His insomnia wasn’t as bad as it had been in the last decade,  but it still tended to crop up at the most annoying times. Like the night following a flight back from the Andes, during which he’d had to contend with that ridiculous Captain Don Karnage.

He’d stared at the canopy of his four-poster bed, the pirates’ infuriatingly catchy tune playing on loop in his head, for what felt like hours. It likely had been, as the melody followed him into whatever brief snatches of sleep he managed to attain.

Scrooge turned on his side and looked out the diamond patterned window beside his bed. Though the moon wasn’t full yet, he could already see the faint black crest of the coming eclipse. It had been a long fifteen years since the last one, though the memory of that day’s terror hadn’t lost its edge.

Perhaps when it was time for the eclipse, he and the kids could make a day of it. For all their adventures, it wasn’t often that one witnessed such celestial phenomena. It would do him good to associate some happy memories with the eclipse.

Unfortunately, two a.m. didn’t lend itself to cheery reminisces, and soon Scrooge’s mind was filled with blinding purple light, the rotten egg stench of sulfur, and high, mad laughter. It felt like the dime hanging around his neck was strangling him, the quadriamond chord tightening around his neck.

His heart beating double-time, Scrooge sat up in bed desperately grasping for the dime. Only when he had it in his hand, the metal warm in his palm, did his breathing ease.

All at once, he was angry with himself for overreacting. He had the most powerful witch in existence hanging around his neck, he didn’t have the _luxury_ of panicking.

Scrooge threw back the blankets and  swung his legs around to the side of the bed. His hands were shaking, and he cursed himself for it.

He climbed out of bed and fished around in the dark for his robe. As he tightened the sash around his waist, he resolved to fix himself a cup of tea and distract himself with some television. He’d catch an earful from Beakley if she found out, but he couldn’t stay in his silent room any longer, not with his own thoughts bouncing back at him.

Perhaps Louie had recorded a few episodes of that daffy show he and his brothers loved so much. If nothing else, it would serve to remind him that his big empty house wasn’t so empty anymore.

He crossed the room and reached for the doorknob, more than ready to get out of his bedroom. But he paused in spite of that, because now that he was close to the door he could hear a voice on the other side of it.

“—he just had to fight _pirates!_ Now’s not a good time. No, it’s-it’s common sense.”

It was Lena, whispering furiously to herself just outside his door.

The more cowardly part of Scrooge, the one that kept him from seeking out Donald for the last decade, immediately told him to hide out in his room until Lena went away. And then he was infuriated with himself all over again, because since when did Scrooge leave a child in distress, much less one in his care?

Scrooge opened the door and looked out into the hall. He didn’t have to look for long. He found Lena curled up with her back against the wall and arms around her knees, not a foot from his bedroom doors.

They blinked at each other for a moment, Scrooge startled but Lena sporting a deer-in-headlights look that verged on _terror._

“Lena,” he said quietly, because he couldn’t imagine what had frightened her so, “are you alright?”

The hallway was dark, save for the light of stars, though Lena’s face was illuminated from below by the phone in her lap. The pale blue light cast her features into sharp relief. With her hair mussed and face free of makeup, she looked younger than he could’ve imagined. At the same time, the shadows under her eyes were deep and dark as pitch, out of place on her youthful face.

“Shi- _shoot_ , this is actually your room, isn’t it?” she said, rather than answer his question. The fear that originally immobilized her had begun to eb, but the hitch in her voice didn’t seem to be leaving anytime soon.

Scrooge cocked a brow at the girl’s non sequitur, once more disguising his disquiet. He stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him.

“Aye, it is,” he replied, “why wouldn’t it be?”

“Uh,” Lena said, looking away. Her phone went dark, and Scrooge had trouble discerning her expression in the sudden dark. “Well I-I wasn’t sure. I just-I was looking—I mean, I wasn’t positive—I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

She was rambling. Lena, normally so cool in her composure, was rambling, sitting in the dark beside his bedroom door at an hour unfit for man or beast. To say that he was concerned would be an understatement, but finding her in such disarray left Scrooge feeling wrong-footed. Hypocrite that he was, wanting Lena to open up to him only to panic the instant she did.

“Ah, no, lass,” he said, adopting what he hoped was a comforting tone. “I’m afraid I haven’t been getting much sleep tonight.”

Lena blew out a breath in the dark. Her outline was becoming more clear to his eyes, the curve of her elbow and her bony knees.

“Good,” she said, and immediately flinched. “I mean, not-not _good_ but—”

“Easy, Lena,” Scrooge said, feeling like he should have whiplash after watching Lena bandy her emotions in a way that felt raw and unfiltered, that she must never have intended him to see. “I know what you meant,” he assured her.

Lena didn’t respond, but as his eyes adjusted to the dark he saw her hide her face in her folded arms.

Scrooge shifted his weight from foot to foot for a long moment. The darkness of the hallway stretching before him simultaneously weighed him down and made him feel incredibly light, the vestiges of their daytime personas faded and flickering in the moonlight. His, the ever-savvy, fearless adventurer, and hers the aloof, confident teenager.

“I was gonna make some tea,” Scrooge said, and he saw Lena lift her head slightly. “Want to join me?” He offered her his hand.

After a long pause, she took it.

 

“What kind of tea would you like?”

Lena blinked, tearing her gaze away from the tabletop to look back up at him. “What?”

Standing in the panty and scrutinizing his options, Scrooge said, “What kind of tea, Lena?”

As he waited for Lena to answer, he plucked a box of black tea from a shelf. He could bear the expense just this once. He certainly wouldn’t be getting any sleep at this rate, and there was hardly any point in pretending otherwise.

“Whatever will keep me awake,” Lena mutered after a moment.

Scrooge hummed what could be interpreted as an affirmative as he grabbed a bag of chamomile tea.

He stepped out of the pantry and crossed the kitchen to turn on the kettle, conscious of how pronounced his limp had become without his cane. He knew Lena had noticed too, but he didn’t comment on it as he pulled down mugs from a nearby cabinet.

“Are you...okay?” Lena’s voice was quiet, hesitant, and Scrooge barely heard it over the low burbling of the kettle. Sitting at the kitchen table in an oversized sleep shirt, she looked very small.

Scrooge chuckled. “Oh, aye. I’m not as young as I used to be, and my old injuries don’t let me forget it.”

“Webby said you were, like, over a hundred,” Lena said. “She was joking, right?”

Scrooge busied himself with the tea instead of responding right away, and Lena sputtered for a moment.

“My niece might joke about some things, but never about McDuck history,” he said with only a little bit of pride, picking up the teacups and setting them down on the table.

Lena’s incredulous expression shifted into something thoughtful, and a little confused. As Scrooge settled in the seat across from her, she reached forward to take her tea with a quiet, “thanks.”

They both sipped at their tea. The refrigerator hummed, and sparse birdsong reached them from outside.

“Webby’s not related to you,” Lena said, matter-of-fact.

Scrooge smiled into his teacup. “No, she’s not,” he replied. “But I consider her part of my family.”

Lena frowned at her cup of tea. He wasn’t sure if it was because she’d come to the realization that her tea didn’t have caffeine, or for another reason he wasn’t privy to.

“You know,” Scrooge started to say, “if you fancy Webby, you don’t need to worry—”

 _“What?”_ Lena blurted, jerking up in her seat so quickly she nearly knocked over her teacup, and making Scrooge almost spill his. “I don’t-I’m not!”

In the face of Scrooge’s politely amused expression, she slumped back down, her face pink. She folded her arms on the table and and hid her face in them. “Kill me,” she groaned.

“No need for such drastic measures,” Scrooge replied sympathetically, reaching over to pat her hand. “And we don’t need to talk about it now. Anyway, I suspect it’s not the reason you were sitting outside my door.”

Lena stiffened, just for a second, before shrugging in her usual blasé fashion.

“Bad dream,” she said casually.

“Lot of those going around lately,” Scrooge said. He rubbed the back of his neck, looking at the cupboards to the right of Lena’s head. “Want to talk about it?” he asked haltingly.

“No,” she said. “You?”

“Not particularly.”

“Okay then,” Lena replied, but she was smiling for the first time since he found her sitting in the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

Lena collapsed beside him as Magica rose into the air in a plume of sulfur and dark magic, and Scrooge finally understood.

The bars of their cage buzzed with magic and malice, and she was a child who’d been used, who looked up at him with such terrible hope in her eyes. What could he do but promise her all that he’d already been willing to give her?

But promises meant nothing to Magica. Family was a tool to be wielded and discarded at her leisure, and Lena was no different.

With a flick of her wrist, the witch had Lena shuddering with a cry as blackness leeched its way up her body at a rapid pace. It dragged her to the ground as her legs and torso and and face melted into shadow.

Scrooge reached for her hand too late, and within seconds he had failed yet another family member. A new record.

 

He didn’t believe in miracles, and luck was fickle, but Scrooge might have to thank the powers that be just this once because Lena was impossibly, implausibly _alive._

What had started out as a doomed, desperate bid to restore the girl’s body ended in somehow success despite all indication to the contrary. Even Scrooge, ever one to challenge the odds, had thought it a futile effort. Lena had already died twice over because he couldn’t be bothered to notice that his most hated enemy had taken the girl for her personal puppet. He couldn’t imagine how he could fail her further.

But Webby, iron-forged and teary-eyed, would not take no for an answer. She pushed, and researched, and _hoped,_ even as the ghost of Lena’s shadow faded a little more every day. But they did it.

Using the dime and the vestiges of Magica’s magic within it, they pulled Lena back from the brink and into their waiting arms.

They were a blubbering mess the lot of them, and Lena couldn’t seem to believe that so many people had worried about her, had wanted her back.

“You’re not all crying over me, are you?” Lena asked, incredulous even as she was engulfed in their embrace.

“Lena, you beautiful idiot, we missed you so much!” Webby managed through her tears.

“I made a promise, didn’t I?” Scrooge asked, his arms tight around the pair of them. “I’m just sorry it took so long to make good on it.”

“You’re all so stupid,” Lena laughed, half sobbing as she clung to them.

 

In less than a year, Scrooge’s family had reunited and fallen apart, only to come together larger and stronger than he ever could’ve imagined. Every empty chair at his dinner table would be filled by his nephew, his niece’s sons, the great-niece he had neglected for too long, his pilot and his old partner. Sometimes his head scientist would be there, as well as the brave young man he’d hired as the city’s protector.

And he no longer worried about the quiet teenager who always took the seat furthest from him because she was finally home.

 


End file.
